ZoneMinder Forums

Hello all,
I'm currently in the process of trialling Zone Minder for my company to monitor our retail stores, we currently have 30 stores and are quickly expanding.

Our stores have their own ADSL connection and server, would it be possible to have a client on a manager's PC of a few stores in a region?

Also what is the current support for event triggers like? I'm looking into having our POS software trigger an alarm each time the till draw is opened.
We have decided to use the Axis 207 camera in our stores, since we've discovered it's quite a good camera for what we need.

I am a programmer so I can help where needed.

Cheers

First, I think you need to define requirements. A lot of people we have seen simply ask for things a given way because that is what Geovision/Skyvision/LuxRiot does. We can do better. How many cams are in each store? Of that how many does he want to see? You can set up a master ZM server in the office that captures just the images of the monitores he want to watch. Then have links to each remote server to look at all, or events.

Events can be triggered through x10, so you can probably hook something up to the drawer. Also, you can set a very sensitive zone right at the drawer for motion sensing.

If it's on an ad-hoc basis, why not have a web-page on each site that uses mjpg streams of every local camera (or sets/areas if a lot) on each site's server?

(Assuming mjpeg capable ip cams)

Or, if analog cameras - use zm's montage, or generate html from zm's output and do the above.

No need to send any data across the adsl unless it's actually being viewed. Doesn't take much to stuff up a typical adsl's upstread of 256-512kbit.

Hi all, firstly sorry for the late reply but the whole project got put back a bit and we did leave zoneminder since we're having to run it under vmware server and there were performance issues.

Anyway now back on the case.
At each store we have four cameras and with regards regions there currently exists about 6 stores in each region, I can certainly see that we could just use the zonemonitor monitors but that wouldn't give any access to the archives I assume.

Our POS supplier is creating a method that their software will send an ip packet each time the draw is opened, I'll look into the x10 stuff.